Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Would You Like a Bike With That Coffee?

Buy a coffee, and we’ll lend you a free bike. This is the idea behind a
novel kind of bike-share scheme in the Czech Republic, where group of
cafes in Brno, the country’s second-largest city, have come together to
offer customers free biking. Dropping in for a drink, all users need to
do is put down a deposit of 300 Crown ($16) and they get a lock, a
folding bike and a request to turn it in at the end of the day at any of
the participating centers. Amazingly given some bike-share schemes' growing pains, organizers have had no problems with abuse or theft since the project started last year.

Brno’s project is small – so far only five bike points are involved –
but the city’s alternative and apparently unique model still has some
very useful lessons for other cities looking to get more citizens
biking.

Firstly, Brno shows that you don’t always have to go big, either in
bike numbers or in sponsors. Major bike-share schemes typically involve
major enterprises like Citibank and Barclays, but Brno’s participants
are all small, local businesses – its hub is a café, bar and arts venue
in Brno’s old city called Kavarna Trojka.
While participants like Trojka need to take a long view, they clearly
believe they can recoup their investment in a few bikes by encouraging
more customers to buy drinks, by developing user loyalty and creating a
city-wide publicity platform for themselves and the events they host.

Secondly, micro-schemes mean you don’t necessarily need to invest in
new infrastructure. Brno has no docking stations, specially designed
vehicles or bike redistribution system. All it relies on is
participating venues having enough space to store some fold-up bikes.

Brno's city center.

Thirdly, Brno proves that you can have private bike-share start-ups
even in cities lacking the cash or political momentum to create larger
public schemes. With 385,000 citizens, the city isn’t huge and, while
much of it is very attractive, it’s not really a major tourism magnet
either. But while no municipal bike-share scheme has been set up there
yet, Brno is still highly suitable for cyclists. Its largely 19th
century center is already semi-pedestrianized and its street plan is
often too narrow and twisting to accommodate cars easily. The scheme is
no solution for commuters, but picking up a bike after breakfast or
coffee to run around town on is both easy and cheap.

Brno’s plan has clear and self-imposed limitations of course. Run by
volunteers, its plan is to expand only gradually, while its users are
more likely to be the sort of people who frequent artsy cafés than a
broad cross-section of the city’s population.

This could, however, have the effect of creating a more conscious
biking community that feels it has a stake in the scheme. Scheme
organizer Pavel Baďura told Czech site iDnes.cz:

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the fact that those who borrow
the bikes are so responsible. I expected that all of the cafés involved
would have to keep a closer eye on things and put more effort into
getting people to return the bikes and to treat them well. But so far
it’s been quite the opposite.

In assessing Brno’s possible relevance to the future of bike-sharing,
the spread of public Wi-Fi is perhaps a good model. While ubiquitous
Internet access may well be on the way, cafes the world over have long
been making up for coverage gaps by attracting customers with free
broadband. With bike-share taking off globally, we may likewise be
working towards a world where many more cities have some form of cheap
or free cycling scheme. But in the meantime, initiatives like Brno’s can
help plug gaps. By feeding an enthusiasm for urban cycling, they
demonstrate that even in places with little political might backing
bike-share, the public appetite is still out there.